Client stories
Entrepreneur as a Service - Case Lassila & Tikanoja
Entrepreneur as a Service - Case Lassila & Tikanoja
The circular economy is no longer just a future trend. It is constantly expanding and requires a steady and controlled material flow from different industries and areas of life.
However, a comprehensive expansion will not happen without a reliable and visionary expert like Lassila & Tikanoja, who can help companies and society seize the opportunities of the circular economy.
Lassila & Tikanoja is a Finnish service company that builds sustainable growth for the future specifically focusing on the circular economy and its opportunities. L&T is committed to making the circular economy a reality and ensuring a sustainable tomorrow where no raw materials, energy, or time is wasted.
To do this, Lassila & Tikanoja offers their customers everyday service solutions for recycling and sustainable property maintenance, collecting and controlling material flows, and helping their customers reduce waste generation and energy consumption.
In 2016, L&T founded a new collection of services called Helppopalvelut through its internal service accelerator program, focusing on building new in-house digital services.
Helppopalvelut includes three different services: Helpponouto, a collection service for recycling large household items such as old furniture, Helppolava, a fixed fee skip hire service for private and commercial building sites, and Helpposäkki, a skip bag collection service, ideal for household and garden waste.
Helppopalvelut was created to provide recycling services to consumers and small businesses alike for large items, such as furniture or construction waste, with an easy and fast way to book services online when needed.
In 2020 Lassila & Tikanoja decided that it was time to take the Helppopalvelut services business to the next level, but the challenge was that managing and growing this kind of complex service portfolio requires specific knowledge and a strong entrepreneurial mindset. Unfortunately, this kind of entrepreneurial skill set is rarely found in-house, and without assistance from an experienced entrepreneur, the Helppopalvelut team would have had a hard time reaching their goals.
Luckily, Coventures had a person who was up for the job. Tommi Huovinen is one of our Entrepreneurs in Residence, and his job is to work as an intrapreneur in the client's organization.
Tommi's strong background in digital business development and sales convinced L&T's management. He has been driving SaaS growth as an entrepreneur and a country head at a VC-backed startup and has been instrumental in helping numerous early-stage startups, and corporate customers build and launch digital products and services.
Lassila & Tikanoja trusted Tommi to come in and help the team build the next growth chapter in Helppopalvelut’s service portfolio.
“The reason we decided to work with Coventures, was that they had a good understanding of our venture development needs and were able to bring in the right kind of talent and experience to help us with our ambitious growth targets in Helppopalvelut’s service portfolio.” -Sebastian Aniszewski, Business Director.
In the beginning, it was clear to Tommi that there was no clear set of metrics. It was necessary to define what data points were to be measured and how to measure them.
First of all Tommi helped the team to determine the North Star metric, which is used to define which individual metrics can assess services' value to their end-users. Also, Tommi was curious to find out which other 3-5 smaller metrics would increase the services' value.
To better understand the current situation and to have a starting point for measuring results, the team needed to build funnels to map out how much traffic each service had, the primary sources of traffic, conversion rates, and the bottlenecks.
Lassila & Tikanoja had previously focused on large-scale marketing actions and campaigns. Large campaigns can have a big impact, but the results are difficult to predict. With the management's blessing and support, Tommi introduced a new way of working and made experimentation a part of the team's culture.
To identify the ideal customers and ways in which to reach them, the team has carried out weekly experiments. The experiments have focused on testing out hypotheses regarding different marketing channels, tactics, and messages. While the main channels are now generating a steady supply of new customers, Tommi and the team have been able to double down on what works and find new, more efficient user acquisition channels.
One of the big wins for the team was an earned PR campaign for Helppolava. A curated article written about Helppolava was published in several local newspapers around Finland. Through the campaign, Helppolava gained significant new attention from previously unreached geographical locations around Finland.
After one year of close cooperation with Tommi and Coventures, the results are speaking for themselves. The entire Helppopalvelut business has more than doubled its revenue from 2019 and the same rapid growth is expected in 2021. In fact, Helppopalvelut is now one of the fastest growing Lassila & Tikanoja businesses.
“Tommi and Coventures played a key role in helping the team to reach the growth goals set for the Helppopalvelut business and we are happy to continue our collaboration with them to reach our goals set for 2021.” - Sebastian Aniszewski, Business Director.
One of the biggest challenges for corporations when building internal startups is finding and attracting senior entrepreneurial talent. The need may also be temporary if we find out that there is not a strong enough business case to be made.
Coventures’ “Entrepreneur as a Service” model is a flexible way for corporations to get the right kind of entrepreneurial talent for their business building needs and to reach their ambitious growth targets. We have an extensive network of experienced professionals who are always available to help concepting, validating or growing a new business.
Let's explore the options together. Usually we have an ideal candidate for your specific needs ready in our network!
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